Unofficial news and tips about Google

May 17, 2007

Google Video Starts to Index Third-Party Video Sites

As promised in January, Google Video started to index videos outside the Google Land (YouTube + Google Video), one of the first steps necessary to qualify as a video search engine. The first video site seems to be Metacafe and the screenshot below illustrates a query that returns only one result: a video from Metacafe. In most of the cases, YouTube videos dominate the search results and that isn't likely to change unless Google limits the number of results for each site, like they do in web search.

While Google sends you to Metacafe if you click on the title link, the preview option shows the video in a Google Video player and, what's more, Google actually hosts the FLV file.

Unlike the videos from YouTube and Google Video, the results from Metacafe don't have previews and information from metatags in Google's main results. The only new addition is a thumbnail: